Weather Woes and Wrong Roses

I realize it may be often boring when ProfessorRoush complains about the lack of rain in Kansas in the summer, but bear with me a minute, and I'll let you feel a bit of my pain, and then I'll throw in a gorgeous gratuitous rose picture to end on today on a (semi)-high note.   Down and up, your emotions on a never-ending rollercoaster along with my Kansas blog.

Frustration, thy name is moisture.   Necessary and welcome whenever, wetness in this area of the country is a gift, a blessing from the sky however and whenever it comes.  I'm at the point of happily accepting the 80 mph winds and hailstorms and occasional sheltering in the basement as long as it brings rain.   Since May 30th, we had not any rain in this area, a period of drought that denied daylilies and blackberries any chance for full development.

Worst of all, my weather app had promised a decent chance of rain every day this past 10 days.  You would logically think that if there was a 30% chance of rain each day, it would rain one day in every three, correct?   Well, in Manhattan Kansas, that logic doesn't compute.   Oh, it rained on most days, it just rained all around us.   After watching storms last week go around us, I started snapping screenshots of the radar this week for proof.   I'm the blue dot in these shots, and the top photo is Tuesday, the second Thursday (flooding north, nothing on us), and this one at right is Friday morning.   My weather app actually said it was sprinkling here Friday as I screenshot the radar.   I evidently need a new weather app.   Or my weather app needs to learn from its poor performance and improve.

Finally, Friday night this storm at the left developed in early evening and held true for a half inch of rain and then a second storm rolled over in the middle of the night and laid down another 1.5 inches.   Saturday morning I could almost hear my buffalograss applauding as I stepped outside.   I've now skipped two days of watering new roses and I think the browning grass is already greening up.  If there's a bright side to the drought, the lawn didn't grow at all last week and so I can skip a week of mowing.   That radar-imaged storm you see pictured at the left looked like this as it moved in: 

Doesn't that look beautiful?   I considered dancing naked in the rain, but realized the neighbors might talk.

In other news, I do have a number of new roses growing this summer, courtesy of the Home Depot "Minor Miracle" that I wrote about earlier and this one is one of the new ones, a fabulous florescent orange-red semi-double that screams "watch me" in a exhibitionist display of pride.  On the downside, I don't know what variety it really is.  Two of the labeled Home Depot 'Hope for Humanity' roses look like this and they're obviously not 'Hope for Humanity'.   My best guess is that I now have two 'Morden Fireglow', although the foliage seems more glossy than I remember that rose.  In its favor, the stems are red like 'Morden Fireglow' and the color is so unique, it is hard for it to be anything else.  Certainly, this isn't a reborn 'Tropicana' and time and winter hardiness may reveal its secret identity.   Of similar concern is that the labeled 'Rugelda' I purchased appears to be a 'Hope for Humanity' instead.  The 'Morden Sunrise' and 'Zephirine Drouhin' seem correct, so they're not all labeled wrong, but 'John Cabot' hasn't bloomed and isn't acting like a climber.  Who knows what I've got?

I said I would end on a (semi)-high note, right?   You didn't really expect a fully happy ending from this blog did you?   After all the times you've been here?   My mystery rose is a beautiful rose indeed and certainly provides some color to contrast the subtle daylilies, but is it really too much to expect that if I'm paying $13 or $14 for a big-box-store rose, it would be labeled correctly?   How hard is that?

Moss Musings

Today's blog entry may be surprising to anyone who lives in an area where plentiful rainfall occurs during summer, but the fact that I care about a pad of green moss will not be surprising to anyone living and gardening in Kansas and other arid Western states. 

I've always cared about moss.  I've long been fascinated by the "primitive" botany of these spore-producing survivors whose ancestors first colonized land, evolving millions of years before flowering plants came along.  There was a period in my teens when I could identify most of the common mosses of the Indiana woods I grew up in and tell you what their presence meant for soil acidity and moisture.  That knowledge has sadly been crowded out of my brain over the years by other trivia, but my fascination for the persistence and presence of moss remains. 

I was astonished to see this growth this summer, documenting this scene in October in my garden on my camera simply because moss is unheard of in this exposed, predominantly clay area and practically impossible in July and August, yet it was there all summer.  This spot is in full sun right along the edge of my vegetable garden, and yet this moss thrived here, grew all summer long, and made it clear up until the first freeze.  If you look closely, you can see the low electric fence wire running across the picture; the very fence that I depend on to keep rabbits, deer, and other critters out of the vegetables, and the grass/hay mulch at the top of the picture that I use to cover the garden.  

Normally, I might find a little moss along the north edge of the limestone blocks that line some of my garden beds, perhaps occasionally in May or June when it warms and we have enough moisture to support it, but even in those sun-protected areas the moss is temporary, springing up in hours and drying and dying just as fast.  I haven't checked recently, but the 50% additional annual rainfall we've seen from January 2019 has held steady and we are going to finish the year with a near record rainfall for this region.  I guess that's what it really takes to grow moss. 

Most surprising to me, however, is that after all the moisture I expected to have a bumper crop of "fairy ring" mushrooms this year.  I've blogged  previously about this, only seeing the two pictured in the previous post and the singular warty puffball (above left) I discovered in a dry path halfway up the slope from the garden to the house on August 31st.  That's it, three mushrooms in an entire wet year.  Many are God's mysteries created to vex mortal beings.

   

Please, Fall, Come.

ProfessorRoush is absolutely, assuredly, positively, unquestionably, and undoubtedly ready for Fall.  Things out there in the greater garden are looking bedraggled and I'm decisively ready for Fall.  I'm tired of mowing the lawn every week without fail and I'm surely ready for Fall.  The lilac leaves are mildew-ing and dropping and both they and I are conclusively ready for Fall.  Everything is overgrown and I'm losing to the weeds and I'm categorically ready for Fall.  Come on over, Fall!

I woke this morning to the perfect hint of Fall, but I have yet to be convinced that we will see it.  There was moderate fog around and I love the fog for its dampening of sounds from town and the sense of isolation it brings.   The view above, straight into the garden and lacking the usual houses on the horizon, takes me back 10 years in an instant, to a time before those houses were built and it was just us and the sky to the south.  Click on it and dive in with your soul.  And the view below, at a slight eastern angle to the first, picks up the longhorn cattle grazing in the pasture and my neighbor's pond beyond.  Serenity at its finest.  Don't you feel calmed by the scene?

It has been such a weird gardening year with the rain and all.  If you knew anything of Kansas, you should know that the garden above should be browning by now, if not completely August-drought-dry.  Instead, the growth is nearly as green as at the beginning of spring, as it has been all summer long, just beginning to show the changes of grass color to the reds of fall. I've never, since moving to the prairie, mowed every week all summer and by this time of year I'm usually able to cut every other week if not just once a month.

I checked on Friday, and through that day, we've had 42.18 official inches of rain in 2019, an increase over average rain of 14.76 inches, or in other terms, 54% more than the average annual rainfall through September 6th!  Climate change or coincidence?  Just for those following the fictions of Al "the Arctic will be ice free by 2014" Gore, the high and low temperatures here for September 6, 2019 were 94ºF and 68ºF respectively.  The records for that date are a high of 106ºF set in 1913 and a low of 42ºF set in 1962.  If climate change it must be, I think I'd prefer the extra rain and today's temperatures versus the high of 1913.  In fact, even 1913 seems to be a weird record since the majority of the high temperature records in this area were established in the Dust-Bowl 30's. 

The strangest part of this year, to me, was that because of all the wet weather, my garden's fairy ring never materialized.  I have an enormous fairy ring in my garden, which I've never written about but have intended to.  In recent years, it has approached more than 50' in diameter, old and growing every year.  Instead, I waited and waited and they almost never came.  These two mushrooms above, the smaller posing for a close-up in the photo below, just popped up in the fairy ring yesterday and are the only two I've seen anywhere in the garden this year.  Since the same official rainfall records note that we are -0.72" behind our annual average rain for September (making the earlier part of the year even more wet in comparison), is it that this fairy ring only dances in drought times?  Inquiring minds would like to know.

Fall and Winter

'John Cabot'

Where to begin?  It's been so long since my last post.  I had the desire, I had the need, but I lacked the final urgency to blog.  There was always something more pressing, more distracting, more immediate.  Excuses aside, by late August, I gave up on the garden and its Japanese Beetles and its drought. I was trying to ignore the actions of some unknown burrowing creature that was attempting to dig half of the garden up and I was disgusted by the lack of blooms and wilting daily along with the flowers.

Renewal, however, is always just around the corner in a garden.  There were always bright spots, refreshing moments like the 'John Cabot' rose (photo above) trying to climb through an old sitting bench near it.  The spray was half eaten away, but it still shone like the entrance to heaven from halfway across the garden.  I rallied in time to purchase a couple of dozen daylily starts at the local sale and gathered the energy to water them enough to keep them alive.   And the irrepressible  crape myrtles bloomed on time and gave way to panicled hydrangeas and late summer shrubs in their due time.

Sweet Gum

By September, we had a deficit of 10 inches of annual rainfall, almost half of the normal total expected.  Then, in a single night, the drought was extinguished by a deluge, parts of Manhattan were temporarily under water, the farm ponds filled and overflowed, and the ground cracks disappeared.  Over the following 2 weeks, three separate rainfalls added another 11 inches to the total, a year's rain in less than a month, and the world was mud.

Fall was nice while it lasted.  My young Sweet Gum, Liquidambar styraciflua (above, left), won my undying gratitude for its glowing orange fall foliage, and the prairie began to greet the sun every morning with its own display of gold and rust (below).  There are many here who believe fall is the best season on the prairie, and I can scarcely find any reason to quibble.

Despite the rejuvenating rain, the garden had little time to respond, as fall was short-lived.  On October 15th, two weeks earlier than any I've seen in 30 years of living here, we got a heavy wet snowfall of 3 inches.  While it made a winter wonderland of the landscape, it was an early finish to the annuals and the sedum and the chrysanthemums.  You can call it "weather," instead of climate change, all you want, but a record-early snowfall of decades, to the garden and to me, suggests that things are getting colder, not warmer.  We've already had 4 separate snowfalls in the last month, another anomaly for my scrapbook.  My unscientific conclusions were also bolstered by the "climate" of last weekend, as we smashed a 110 year old record overnight low for the date.  Maunder minimums, meet the 3rd millennium!  

I'll leave you, here on the 2nd day of December, 2018, with these last two pictures to ponder.  The first, taken at 7:52 a.m last Sunday, was my back garden at the start of a day of incoming climate.  The second, taken just after 11:00 a.m. through the same window, the frozen tundra that was previously my back garden.  That morning, if a mastodon had come lumbering out of the gale-driven snowfall, I wouldn't have batted an eye.  Except for the 4 foot drift on my front sidewalk, which I shoveled away while I composed a spirited few words that might have taken Al Gore's name in vain, most of this snow is already gone, feeding the prairie grass roots deep in the saturated soil.   This year, at least, I won't have to worry about the lack of soil moisture available for the shrubs as the ground freezes and churns.  Climate-change has its own little gifts, I guess.

When a Kansas drought ends....

...it really ends.  If you've been wondering where I've been, I've been in Garden Depression-land, with only time to spare on weekends for watering everything that I didn't want to die.  It has been bad between the drought and the winds that took out several trees in my yard, among them my beloved ornamental Red Peach tree.  The only bright-side of my summer has been that I only mowed once from mid-July to late August.  Dry grass is tolerable when the mowee, i.e. me, doesn't have to sit on a roaring lawn mower for several hours each week.  

Two weeks ago, I happened to look in the local newspaper at the weather snapshot, to find out that, as I suspected, around 12+ inches of rain had fallen in Manhattan this year and we were 10+ inches lower than average.  So we had half our normal rainfall and all of our normal hot July temperatures by the middle of August.  I have been collecting weather radar pictures of storms going north and south of us all summer for the purpose of blogging about it, but couldn't bring myself to include you in my depression.  

And then, surprisingly, it started to rain.  Yes, here, in the Flint Hills!  In the past two weeks, we had several 2-3 inch rains that probably totaled 10 inches so I thought we were back on track, although the paper yesterday said that we were still 6 inches behind normal.  I forgot that annual rainfall is a moving target but at least we were catching up.  Suddenly everything is green again and I've had to mow weekly the past two weekends.

But last night the skies fell in!  From midnight to 6 a.m., the rain overwhelmed all my gauges, including the 5" gauge in the front landscaping on the blue hummingbird pole (2nd picture from top) and the 7.5" gauge in the back of the house at the top right. If you can't tell tell from the pictures, both are filled to their rims.   I have no idea how much rain we really had.  The pots with plugged drainage holes, above and to the left, also filled up to their brims, but at that point they were probably splashing out more droplets than were staying in them.  So your guess is as good as mine.  All this water was dumped into what is known as the "Wildcat Creek Basin," flooding an apartment complex, the town soccer fields, and a shopping center on the west side of Manhattan.  We even made the national NBC news tonight!  And now, some chances of rain are forecast 6 days of the next 7.  Can somebody please control the spigot better?

So, I'll try to blog from time-to-time again, since I have a garden and it seems to be green in places.  But I might get caught up in a whole series of new experiences.  For example, this morning, as I walked from the front yard around the house to the back, I was hearing the sound of a waterfall.  Waterfall>? Wait, what?  And then I realized; my neighbor's pond, which doesn't hold water and has been dry all summer, had filled up and was overflowing around the edge.  I, of course, rushed inside immediately to tell Mrs. ProfessorRoush that I had finally gotten her the garden water feature she's been wanting!

Incidentally, I thought about titling this blog entry, "When it rains, it pours."   Too cliche though, right?

Here's Why (Weather)

Given my post yesterday, some may have thought I was kidding about the weather here.  So, as further evidence, I give you these photos; taken last night around 8:30 p.m.   No rain was predicted, yet this front came sweeping in from our northwest and caught us by surprise.






A few minutes later, you can see that the main wall of the front is going to sweep just to our north (again!) and that the sun is now shining in the direct west. 









On the plus side, as the front went by, the setting sun and the back side of the wall combined on the southeast side of the house into a startling mix of perfect pastel color.








And finished off with a double rainbow to our direct south as the sun set.  Can't ask for more than that.

Except, of course, rain.  We got a sprinkle, enough to make the pavement look wet.  And that was all she wrote.  Wamego, the next proper town east, had a bit of a blow, with a few trees down.

Weather Wierdness

I'm normally "ProfessorRoush Proud" that I've become something of a weather guru to Mrs. ProfessorRoush and her friends.  So many years of reading the Kansas sky, smelling the air, and viewing the radar patterns have made me and those around me reasonably confident and comfortable that I can reliably predict the immediate weather patterns and their severity better than the internet or evening newscasts.   I frequently get calls or texts on summer evenings asking me if a friend should take shelter from a dark sky or whether they can go safely to sleep, ample evidence that my meteorological mastery has indeed been recognized by others in my circle. 

Not this year, though.   This morning, Mrs. ProfessorRoush texted me as she was beginning a trail walk with a friend to ask me if it was safe to go despite the dark northern sky.  A quick check of the radar and a look at the movement of the pattern and I told her to go ahead and take a hike.  You can see Manhattan in the screen capture at the right, 8:30 a.m., just at the southern edge of a storm that was moving straight east to west and just to our north.  Mind you, the hourly weather forecast for this zip code showed no rain chances here at all until evening. 

Within an hour, however, we had a pretty stiff downpour on the east side of town, so I knew the west side was getting pummeled.  And look at the radar.  At 9:30 a.m., these patterns were moving stiffly to the northeast.  The previous rain stayed put but moved a little east to touch us, and then a large storm formed south and west of Manhattan and headed directly our way.  None of the lower pattern was even a wisp of color an hour prior.  And, while it was currently sprinkling outside, the internet weather still showed no rain until tonight.

Mrs. ProfessorRoush was not pleased with me.  When I texted and told her there was more coming, she said "I wish you would have looked when I asked."  I think, I think, she just might have believed me when I told her that I had, but she also might suspect that I wouldn't be above a quiet chuckle, sitting in my nice dry office, wondering if her hairdo got drenched.  I'll vow here and now in print, however, that I know better than to pull a little prank at the whims of the Kansas weather.

July Drive-By

My, my, how time flies by and leaves us standing in the dust of our best intentions.  I was on track for several months to add bi-weekly notes to this blog, but in the middle of June my resolve ran up against the Kansas climate and melted like butter on a stove. This toadstool photo, taken this morning, is illustrative of our gardening year here.

You see, friends, I came into this gardening year so excited for new life and new growth.  Ample rains in March and April erased our long drought and opened up all the nascent promise of
my garden, a green and growing paradise in my immediate vision.  It was almost perfect right up until we received the hailstorm in the last week of April, a hail that stripped leaf and promise and future.

May was quiet here, quiet except for the few peony buds and roses that survived the hail.  There were few irises, peonies, and roses in my early garden, and as the season developed, it was apparent that there were to be no strawberries, cherries, peaches, or apples to console my feelings.  I struggled even to enter my garden, pained by the lack of bloom and vigor, but I held out hope for my stalwart daylilies.

And then, in late May and through June, the heat struck and the rain stopped.  The garden dried and the ground cracked.  The grass turned brown and even the daylilies slowed their onslaught.  Hemerocallis is a tough genus, but not tough enough for early drought.  They bloomed, but not in their usual numbers or robust cheerfulness.

In late June and early July, it rained again, and kept raining at regular intervals, a unusual pattern for Kansas, and the grass greened up and the weeds rushed in.  Weeds, weeds everywhere, but not a domesticated flower to be seen.  Normally, in July, I can count on mowing every other week and relaxing from the heat.  Not this year, for I have been forced into weekly mowings of the entire yard and weeding at every opportunity.   Roundup is my new best friend.  And the ground is wet, wet enough so that toadstools grow in July right by the front walk.  You can guess that the tomatoes in this area are not performing very well in the wet clay.  Right now, the only crops that look to be decent are watermelons and cantaloupes.

And so I stand, on the brink of August, too busy with other things to garden, too depressed to even look at my devastated strawberry bed, too chagrined to even hope for a colorful fall.  I'll write when I can.  I've saved a few photos of the best of the year.  Maybe I can summon the cheerfulness in August to highlight them.

Until then, adieu.

Puddle in Pink

No, the photo at the left is not a diagram of the Florida peninsula that I have outlined in pink to indicate the nesting areas of flamingos or the winter homes of manatees.  Nor am I illustrating coastal erosion nor designating the position of the continental shelf off Tampa Bay.  All of those might be useful illustrations for a discussion or lecture on those topics, but I will refrain from expounding on any of those at the present time.

This IS a rain puddle on my blacktop just past the garage pad.  In fact, it is not just any rain puddle, it is THE rain puddle, the MOST IMPORTANT puddle, the puddle that I seek after every rain to provide me with a first estimate of overnight accumulation when I want to avoid walking to my rain gauge in the morning chill.  Over the years, I've come to know what each area and depth of this puddle means in terms of rain on my prairie.  Small puddle; less than 1/10th of an inch of rain fell.  Medium puddle; rain measured in 10th's.  Large puddle; might have to watch or I'll slip when walking down the hill.  Puddle overflowing the blacktop; so rare here as to be counted with hen's teeth.

As this modest puddle illustrates, however, this past weekend did bring blessed, life-giving rain to us in several small spurts.  First there was 1/10th on Friday, then wind, then another 5/10th's on Saturday morning, then wind, then a bit more rain on Sunday.  I think we got a total of just over an inch.  We need more, meaured in feet, not inches, but at least we are now back above 50% of expected average rain for this time of year.  And the prairie is no longer coated in fine powder like the surface of the moon, nor does my clay contain cracks that Bella might fall into.

The small pink petals outlining the Saturday (larger) puddle and now floating in the smaller Sunday puddle are Redbud blossoms blown down from Mrs. ProfessorRoush's favorite tree.  Yes, the Redbud flowering period has come and again, regrettably, gone here on the Kansas prairie.  Time moves on and the gardener needs to get all those final Spring chores.  I think I saw the first blossom on 'Marie Bugnet' last night from the window.  If so, it is several weeks early, and I am running several weeks late..

How Could It Not?

How could a storm like this one, only a few miles from Manhattan, with enough wind and lightning to wake me up at 1:00 a.m., still not drop any rain on us?  I was sound asleep, but startled wide awake to howling wind and rattling screens.  Our bedroom was lit up by almost continuous lightning flashes. The entire line of storms was
coming straight at us, west to east, bearing down quickly.  Oh, Joy!

But I knew something was wrong.  There were no watches or warnings on the local TV channels; a bad omen because these days the weather people seem to panic at every drizzle. The lightning was abundant, but was what we oldtimers call "heat" lightning; flashes of lightning high in the atmosphere without any accompanying thunder to scare the children.  All this fury and force, probably creating rain that was evaporating before it could reach the ground.  Curses.

We've seen no rain from mid-June through August 9th, almost two entire months during our hottest time of year.  On the positive side, I hadn't mowed my yard since July 1st.  On the negative side, the roses are not very prolific right now and things are drying up before their time.  We did have a brief respite on the weekend of August 10th, with a total of 1.9 inches of rain over three days.  That momentarily filled in the cracks and resulted in me having to mow down the weeds in the grass on August 17th.  But we're already dry again and the next few days are forecast to hit the 100's.

Please be warned.  I promise you that the next time I see something like this on radar, day or night, I'm going to do everything possible to see that it rains.  I'll rush out to water the hopeless lawn, I'll spray the weeds with weedkiller, and I'll quickly have the car washed and then leave it out to be rained on.  Heck, if the clouds form nearby but I see them start to move, I'm going to run out naked and do a rain dance.  Surely it won't come to that, but desperate times call for drastic measures.  You might want to drive by my house with blinders on for a bit, just in case.

I Think That Any Rain is Good Rain

And if that's true, then this morning we had a great rain. Thank the skies above, I heard the thunder at 4:30 a.m. and then rose with the patter on the windows reminding me to close the windows that were open. One thunderstorm followed another and by 7:30a.m., I woke singing to an old Bachman Turner Overdrive song;

"She said, I've had it comin' to me

But I wanted it that way

I think that any love is good lovin'

So I took what I could get, mmh

Oooh, oooh she looked at me with big brown eyes

And said, 

You ain't seen nothin' yet

B-b-b-baby, you just ain't seen n-n-nothin' yet"

Rain on the Kansas Flint Hills is always a time to rejoice. Parched spirits are replenished along with the thirsty hills who are just waking to Spring. In the midst of euphoria, I had enough presence of mind to set up the iLightningcam app so that I could capture the moments of lightning and rain on my greater garden. In the photo above, you can see the paths of the garden turning green, emerald against the prairie grasses still cloaked in winter gold. My tower of Sweet Autumn clematis is greening in the center, and behind it, a Jane Magnolia holds onto it's last rain-soaked blooms. At the left foreground, my iris bed readies a banquet of blooms, the aptly named 'First Edition' already in flower. An early viburnum or two stand out white against the dark foliage of the early morning in the greater garden. Even in the golden carpet of the foreground, you can see the forbs greening up, the genesis of wildflowers that will come along as the seasons mature. This is the area of native prairie between the house and garden that I mow just once a year, every Spring, to allow the wildflowers a chance to compete. Fed by the rain and by the nitrogen generated out of the lightning, all this is going to explode these next few weeks, a bounty of foliage and flowers miraculously generated from dead twigs and brown earth.

It's 10:30 a.m. now and I just braved the continuing lightning and sprinkles to check my closest rain gauge. There is 2.4 inches in the gauge and it is still coming down, more slowly now as if the skies know the earth needs some time to bask in the glory of wetness spreading deep beneath the surface. According to this morning's sodden newspaper, we were 2.86 inches behind average rainfall for 2014 yesterday and an inch behind April's average rainfall. No more. Now the promises of the peonies and the roses are freed to fill us again with joy and beauty and grace.